1BR

The protagonist in this movie tries to escape a real-life nightmare, but the true nightmare is trying to watch this. Take solace in the fact that you can turn it off. First, 1BR is a shameless rip off of Jordan Peele's Get Out in which a community of seemingly friendly white people kidnap, brutalize, and lobotomize Black people, motivated by their hateful racism. Here the kidnapping, brutality, and lobotomizing are performed with no motivation at all. Director-writer David Marmor fills the movie with creepy horror clichés -- creaking pipes, disturbing music -- to argue that we're watching a horror movie rather than some form of mindless, violent exploitation. He loses that argument. Filled with gratuitous violence (a woman's hands are nailed to a wall and a man tries to hammer a screwdriver into a woman's ear), this purports to be about a cult seeking to spread the good word of selfless communal living. Yet each community member has been kidnapped, tortured, branded, and imprisoned. No worries, there's a philosophy behind the cult's actions, a quest to cure the lonely by way of the "four foundations," openness, acceptance, selflessness, and, most important, "security." An example of the last foundation? The prisoners, uh, tenants, are asked to mutilate and even kill each other when community members try to rebel or escape.

As in The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent, which 1BR also resembles, a young person is trapped in a dystopia, but the other movies, released between 2012 to 2014, ultimately celebrated and rewarded rebellion against oppression. The world-weary 1BR tells our youth, Don't bother rebelling, it's useless.